In communication networks such as mobile communication networks, it may in some cases be desirable to somehow limit the use of a communication network for another user. Parties willing to limit the use may include e.g. network operators, various service providers and end-users having the power to manage e.g. the subscription or content use associated with other users.
For instance, a first user such as a parent might want to limit digital content that a second user such as a child may have access to through the communication network via a user device, such as a cellular phone or tablet computer, in the possession of the child.
In addition, companies and a plethora of other pools of users may find such control mechanisms useful to filter out, among other uses, potentially harmful or otherwise inappropriate content from remaining data traffic between a network and user devices.
However, the various parties involved have commonly found the available control technologies insufficient, inflexible, complex, unreliable or otherwise unsuitable for their purposes at least having regard to certain use cases to be briefly reviewed below.
For example, in some OTT (over-the-top) type solutions for content distribution, user-specific content control is to be carried out through determining the necessary content delivery settings for a target user by a main user. The settings may be determined by connecting to a network service operating a content control server using a management account and adjusting the profile of the target user as desired.
Data traffic, such as internet content from various content provision platforms, could be then rerouted to a user device of the target user through the content control server or related gateway so that the concerned intermediate entity may inspect and filter the traffic according to the settings and allow only allowable content to ever reach the user device.
The above method of setting traffic limitations basically involves construction of an additional loop in the traffic architecture of the communication network. This may create problems arising, among other sources, from a bottleneck effect that is established in the network due to massive amounts of potentially high bandwidth data to be conveyed therethrough, which may cause undesired latency, reduced data rate and even data loss from the standpoint of a single user. Additionally, even more considerable performance issues such as total downtime of data services may materialize if the aforementioned server that is intended for traffic filtering is malfunctioning or unavailable due to e.g. connectivity issues.
Yet, mere content filtering does not still actually suffice for fulfilling quite a large portion of user and user (terminal) device related control needs arising in the context of mobile networks and communication networks in general.
Namely, instead of or in addition to content filtering, policy control regarding e.g. various QoS related factors such as data transmission rate, connectivity to different networks and services, are at least equally if not more important in a multitude of scenarios wherein limited resources are to be allocated for use by a plurality of users.
The resources may be highly technical with reference to the overall capabilities of the available network infrastructure and related supported technologies. Yet, e.g. service subscriptions of individual users or of a pool of users, with reference to family or corporate type subscriptions, may set additional constraints having regard to the availability of resources to the subscription and assign also a price or cost to the resources based on their mere availability or actual usage.
For example, a monthly data plan may assign a certain price for a certain amount of data transferred during the month as well as define a number of technical characteristics such as maximum or average transmission rate available for the data transfer.
Policy control and related activities are typically autonomously executed by the network based on predefined logic and subscription data in a production environment. The existing solutions for user-initiated management of user subscription or user device related policy control are rare and suffer from awkward limitations what comes to establishing a functional control connection between multiple users and/or user devices.